Indian-origin engineer at FTX, Nishad Singh, pleads guilty to fraud charges

business-standard.com:

Nishad Singh, a 27-year-old Indian-origin former top executive of failed cryptocurrency trading platform FTX has pleaded guilty to the charges of alleged billion-dollar fraud at the now collapsed exchange.

Singh was the former co-lead engineer of FTX Trading Ltd.

He has pleaded guilty to six conspiracy charges, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate federal campaign finances laws.

Singh is the third top executive and close confidante of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors.

Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX, and Caroline Ellison, the former head of FTX's sister hedge fund Alameda Research, both pleaded guilty last year and are cooperating against Bankman-Fried.

In December last year, federal authorities charged Bankman-Fried with orchestrating a scheme to defraud equity investors in FTX.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Singh on Tuesday.

In a parallel action, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) also announced charges against Singh.

Singh entered a guilty plea to commodities fraud and other charges in the separate, parallel action against him in the Southern District of New York.

According to the SEC's complaint, Singh created a software code that allowed FTX customer funds to be diverted to Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried and Wang, despite false assurances by Bankman-Fried to investors that FTX was a safe crypto asset trading platform with sophisticated risk mitigation measures to protect customer assets and that Alameda was just another customer with no special privileges.

The complaint alleges